Julie Fredrickson, a longtime tech entrepreneur and conservativeChristian, tells me she frequently feels her religious beliefs are out of place in the tech world. “I’m confident that discovering I’m a Calvinist would lead to some awkward conversations I don’t necessarily want to have with Silicon Valley folks,” says Fredrickson, CEO of the cosmetics company Stowaway. “People who have actually, very carefully considered belief systems, whether religious or otherwise, don’t always feel safe expressing it.”

Silicon Valley is also a two-tiered society of the haves and the have-nots. It has a large homeless population, and poor people living in rundown trailers camp out along one side of Stanford University, not far from the headquarters of Google. Silicon Valley companies rely extensively on work visas to exploit foreign labor, thereby denying engineering opportunities to Americans.

Silicon Valley is a valley in the geographic sense. The proper name for the valley in which much of Silicon "Valley" resides is the Santa Clara Valley.